SCARPIA / Dichotomy in modern dress: Sentiment and sentimentality, Iberian impressions and powerful piano from the Bratke pack

S is for sincerity, but it's also for sentimentality, and in music they often become entangled. Sentimentality works well in its proper place: in pop music, for example, which depends on assuming the two S's are identical. But not in the concert hall. There, to be sentimental is to be second rate, simply because the greatest musical works repeat their emotional effects time and again, yet with a vigour of language that never turns stale.

John Corigliano's First Symphony, performed last Wednesday at the Royal Festival Hall by the Young Musicians Symphony Orchestra, presents the dichotomy in striking modern dress. Nothing could be more definite than the inspiration for this work - the composer's reaction to the ravages of Aids on friends and colleagues. Nor can there be any doubting his conviction. Both within and between the four movements, the moods swing between extremes of hysteria and resignation. There were decibels of disco intensity, piled up by ear-splitting brass and percussion. There were also passages of lyricism, as individual accomplishments were remembered through an exposed cello solo, and an offstage pianist playing dreamy snippets of Albeniz's Tango.

But how far did the music do justice to his message? For that matter, what was the message, given the opacity of the music? Doubtless, the sound and the fury were obligatory. But the combination of ear-splitting noise with post-Mahlerian funeral drumbeats has become such a stand-by of modern music over the last 30 years that they can lack even the smugness of a cliche. Likewise, the bulk of quiet, atonal polyphony, though approached with polished restraint by the young string players, seemed to be without emotional point or thematic purpose - just suitably melancholic.

Thankfully, we were also spared any reference to the ubiquitous Dies Irae. But, in comparison with the programme's other work, Tippett's oratorio A Child of our Time, the lack of common material working on a universal level of grief was striking. The Tippett is not without its mawkishness, some might say. However, the negro spirituals which stand in place of Bach chorales, and the simple, neo-Handelian mannerisms, remain the source of a magic by which the composer translates the private experience of suffering into a general ritual of expiation. Sadly, despite James Blair's enthusiastic conducting, this was an unremarkable performance. The orchestra and the Crouch End Festival Chorus - of several decades' foundation but making its Festival Hall debut - frequently drowned out the quartet of soloists, though in itself the chorus was stylish, disciplined and well balanced.

Yet even when lacking electricity Tippett's conventions were telling, whereas Corigliano's lacked depth. This is partly the fault of the musical language, no longer bearing the resonances of common speech. But it also came from confusing the illness with the elegy. The essence of most requiems, from Mozart to Britten, has been not the absence of life but the contradictory feelings that remain in the living. Taking on this difficult subject, but confused in focus, Corigliano produced less an artistic response than an emotive outburst. The result, in essence, was - sentimental.

This need not be so, even without the religious metaphors that can no longer be taken for granted. Sincere allusion can be more effective than sincere histrionics. Ravel, neither believer nor sentimentalist, produced memorials to colleagues killed in the First World War in the exquisitely formal pastiches of Le Tombeau de Couperin, orchestrated in 1920 and played by the renowned St Paul Chamber Orchestra last Friday at the Barbican. The delicate string figurations of the Prelude, often muddied by the undisciplined phrasing of larger groups, were here pellucid; the rhythmic impetus of the lengthy Forlane never faltered. James Galway made light of Mozart's G major Flute Concerto. Hugo Wolff, directing throughout from memory, gave the rhythmic capers of Beethoven's Second Symphony a modern edge, and the slowly unwinding lines of Barber's Adagio for strings the poise of a classical slow movement.

Sunday offered piano memorials of a rather different kind. Federico Mompou, not well-known in Britain but in his native Spain greatly favoured, lived to be 94 and wrote fervently mystical keyboard works in a Satie-cum-Debussy idiom. Celebrating his centenary, Elena Riu at the Wigmore Hall mixed Impresiones Intimas and Musica Callada (Book I) (Music of Silence), with more conventional fare by Albeniz and Granados.

If this was a brave effort on behalf of a figure always likely to remain in the twilight zone, Marcelo Bratke's Purcell Room performance of the Second Piano Sonata by Ernst Krenek, who died last year, was a revelation.

'Who was Krenek?' asked the man sitting opposite. Difficult to say. Composer of the first jazz opera? Of a set of Lamentations that Stravinsky cribbed for his own jeremiad, Threni? Doubtless, all will be revealed when his centenary celebrations come round with the new century. Meanwhile, the torch will be kept alive by more performances like this one: strong, considered, and with a sense of the music's inner pace and voicing that gave character and presence to even the most austerely contrapuntal moments. Sentimentality can be a problem for players as well, but not for Bratke. He is a gifted recital pianist: poetic, yet never gushing. How he might cope with Bach and Brahms was left to the imagination. But a flashy encore from Webern's Piano Variations suggested the possibility of even broader horizons.